Where were you born and raised? Hartford, Conn. I left there at age 17 to go to Asia and then the West Coast and then Hawaii.

Were there early influences that led to your career path? My mom was always in the grocery industry and I grew up working around the store and helping her. I traveled and moved to Hawaii through grocery chains. But to be honest, being Irish Roman Catholic, my mother had chosen me to be the priest of the family, so it was hard to move away from that one at first! (laughs)

Why specialize in wines, beer and spirits? The wine and spirits section is always the most active section of a store. People talk to staff there, they ask questions, they want to know about different products. The whole conversation with customers is an important and almost a lost piece of our sales history.

Where do you eat out? We try to go to a different restaurant every week it’s a challenge, but good fun. By nature of where we live, we go to Henry Loui’s often.

Do you cook? I’m an aspiring cook! I try to follow recipes now and understand the science of cooking better than I did in the past.

What’s always in your fridge? Fresh fruit, and vegetables usually from our garden, where we produce all our own greens. And fresh roasted peppers my dad was a Russian immigrant and he put peppers on everything.

With so much to choose from, what’s your drink of choice? Gin there are lots of good ones out there, but my favorite is Hendrix and then wine. My current favorite is a nice, fruit-forward Zinfandel.

With whom would you most like to have dinner? Oh, I think family. Particularly my grandmother, who left Russia when she was 7. She traveled, unaccompanied, all the way to New York in 1907, and she ended up raising a family in Connecticut, where they still have a strawberry farm today. There’s a lot of unknown history I’d love to talk to her about.